Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff leaves his party's winter caucus meeting on Parliament Hill on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010.
It would be too much to expect the Liberal Party of Canada's March policy conference to replicate its famous "Study Conference on National Problems" of 1960, better know as the Kingston thinkers' conference. That meeting has entered Liberal Party mythology as a seminal event in Canadian political history, credited with renewing the party and laying the foundation for its support for a more progressive and activist federal government. But if the list of panelists at the Liberals' much anticipated, and delayed, "Canada 150" conference in Montreal is any indication, the party is not rising to the challenge.
There are some important and high-profile participants, to be sure. People such as Janice Stein, Alan Bernstein and Roger Martin will contribute much, as no doubt will others on the list. But what is most striking about the speakers, unveiled yesterday on the event website, is the minute proportion of visible minorities: only three of 43. Given that the meeting is being spun as a bold look at what Canada should be in 2017, when the country celebrates its sesquicentennial, presumably under a benevolent Liberal government headed by Michael Ignatieff, then it has failed fundamentally even before it has begun. Questions of citizenship, diversity and integration are fundamental to what Canada will be in 2017.
What's more, the Kingston conference was, according to the journalist Peter Newman, who attended, also fertile ground for cultivating Lester Pearson's "lieutenants and advisers," with a substantial proportion later being appointed to senior jobs in the Liberal government. It was used as a base to build a new Liberal Party after it had been decimated by John Diefenbaker's Tories. If that pattern of subsuming speakers into a future Liberal government were to hold true with the Montreal conference, then the Liberal Party would not represent the Canada of today, to say nothing of the Canada of 2017. It would represent the Canada of 1960.